Brewster McCloud

Seventeen years before Wenders’s Wings of Desire, the then neophyte director Robert Altman made his treatise about a place in time, angels without wings and people longing for freedom. The first of Altman’s mosaics of human turmoil, which became the director’s trademark, is surprising primarily because, unlike his later acclaimed milestones Nashville and Short Cuts, it is not a serious drama. On the contrary, it is a cunning farce that abounds with symbols and metaphors, while concurrently paraphrasing and disparaging the formulas of Hollywood spectacles. The schizophrenically entertaining principle of adoration and acerbic subversion forms the basis of the entire film and its individual motifs. Thanks to that, Brewster McCloud is simultaneously about everything and nothing. It has a detective storyline about a serial killer whose victims are rather symbolic and a screwball story of love that both uplifts us and drags us down. The film contains a spectacular car chase and a reflection on ideas that are more intoxicating and more stimulating than their execution. It reveals social roles and hierarchies, both metaphorically and parodically, as well as through a separate storyline of goofy ornithological commentary. And, of no less importance, it is a film about shit or, more precisely, bird droppings. At first glance, Brewster McCloud comes across as goofy absurdity thrown together willy-nilly, but it is apparent from the carefully detailed casting, costumes and set that there is a heart of thoughtfulness and sophistication beating below the surface. Like Roger Corman’s Gas-s-s-s, which was made in the same year and is several orders of magnitude more free-thinking in terms of filmmaking and narrative, Brewster McCloud reflects the ethos of the hippie generation. It thus inevitably undermines not only authority and the conservative building blocks of society, but also film genres and classic narrative logic. Brewster McCloud plays by its own crafty rules and thus remains the most rollicking and free-thinking work in Altman’s diverse filmography, in which, unfortunately, his comedies are usually overlooked in favour of his films in serious genres. (03/07/2022)